Right or wrong, the great controversialist is always brilliantly entertaining, as this collection of his essays shows

I
n 2007 Christopher Hitchens provoked anger — nothing new there — with an
essay in Vanity Fair called Why Women Aren’t Funny. The anger was
predictable but unfounded, the essay being rather flattering about women.
But its primary importance was stylistic. Having mentioned Stanford
University School of Medicine, he inserts an irrelevant parenthesis: “A
place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious
procedure with a sigmoidoscope.”

There, in a nutshell, you have the man: so confident he can digress without
explanation, delighting in the technical term, revelling in the indignity
(we are talking about, in essence, a colonoscopy here) and teasing the
reader with a glimpse of his private life. Hitchens is, as they say, full of
himself — and I mean that as a tribute; this is a very good self to be full
of.

One of the world’s leading public intellectuals, in the eyes of old socialists
he